Justice for Julia

Friends,

Please, forgive yet another e-mail asking you to lend your signature to a worthy cause, but circulating this petition is the one thing I can objectively do to help a Russian friend of mine, Julia Privedennaia, who is currently facing a politically motivated trial in the Moscow Region Court. My hope is to send the petition to the US Embassy in Russia (and possibly a few other embassies, if there is a sufficient number of signatures by the relevant nationals), from where such materials typically get forwarded to the Attorney-General's Office of the Russian Federation, becoming part of the legal case and giving it a certain international character. 

Julia war arrested approximately a year ago, as a result of her activities for the non-parliamentary opposition, and ironically, of her preoccupation with legal injustice and police brutality in Russia. After two months in custody, she has been released on bail, pending the outcome of the trial. Fortunately, Julia has had a number of friends to support her. In a press conference following her arrest, Liudmila Alekseeva (President of the Moscow Helsinki Group), Sergei Mitrokhin (Chairman of the Yabloko Party), Sergei Grigoriants (President of the Glasnost Foundation), Svetlana Gannushkina (Chariman of the Committee for Citizens' Mutual Help) spoke about the absurd nature of the accusations and offered to become her legal guarantors. Journalists involved with human-rights cases such as Valeriia Novodvorskaia and Yelena Sannikova have provided regular coverage of Julia's trial. Many of these articles have been collected on the following web site http://www.fakel-portos.ru/jp.php or could be simply found by googling Julia's name.

While her involvement in oppositional politics was never mentioned in the formal trial (except for a note from the FSB to the effect that in recent years, she has been engaged in "anti-Russian activities"), the formal charges against her stem from her participation in the PORTOS youth group (Poeticized Society for the Development of a Theory of People's Happiness) in the town of Liubertsy (near Moscow). Dating back to the perestroika era, that group had up to 150 mostly college-age members, who ran an agricultural co-operative, studied Esperanto, wrote poetry, and published a magazine Theory of Happiness. Because throughout the 1990s, the co-operative was subject to occasional physical attacks by local gangs, asking for protection money, PORTOS members purchased a few hunting rifles and pneumatic guns, whose safe storage the local police would periodically check. After a raid by RUBOP (a special police division) in 2000, which put an end to PORTOS's functional existence, these served as the basis of the main charge of "organizing an illegal armed formation."
The other charge--"illegally holding two or more minors"--was the prosecution's way of describing the collective's relationship to its junior members (15- and 16-year-old, most of whom came from families with problems), who had joined PORTOS with the consent of their parents. One does not have to subscribe to PORTOS's eclectic practices and ideologies, made up of Makarenko's pedagogy; intolerance to drinking and smoking; poetry writing and esperantism; utopianism and critical attitude of contemporary Russian realities, to see that PORTOS was these kids' best chance in life at a time when their families and the Russian state had all but given up on them.

In the ensuing 2000-2002 court case, which was also widely condemned by human-rights activists, three of PORTOS's main organizers were given sentences from 4.5 to 5.5 years, two of whom to forced incarceration to mental hospitals. The diagnosis of "delusional ideas for reformism" was produced by experts from the Serbskii Psychatry Institute, which is notorious for its systematic certification of Soviet-era dissidents as mentally ill, a practice it has resumed in the 2000s with respect to some oppositional activists. The court has recently ordered that Julia be also subjected to such a psychiatric examination and she is currently awaiting its results. Knowing her, as well as a number of other PORTOS members personally, I can vouch that I rarely seen people who are as sane as the are.

Mostly, however, it is remarkable that so many years after the end of the first PORTOS case, the same charges should be brought against Julia. Arrest warrants have also been issued against two other PORTOS members, Olga Shirokaia and Tamara Kostyuk, who currently reside outside of Russia. Given their outspoken engagement with various oppositional causes in recent years, there is little doubt that this revisiting of the PORTOS case is political in nature and it is quite likely that the trial will proceed accordingly.

I do not know what effect--if any--your signature under the petition will have, but occasionally such expressions of international solidarity have been known to help.

Thank you.